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Mother’s Day 2017

For years of my girlhood I could not make sense of my mother’s story: her mother’s mother, filling a lamp

while her baby played beneath the wooden table. How the kerosene caught fire in her long hair, burned,

and she burned before her daughter.

The daughter I could picture, the turned-leg table, the cloth’s point edging with flame, buttoned shoes, a white hem. What I could not comprehend: how could my grandmother have been born, motherless, out of that past? This was

A young woman chests her sleeping child, listens to the catches in his breath. With a fingernail, she chips paint flakes off the sill and counts the ore trucks that quake her father’s house. Dust seeks every seam of the window frame. Vacant houses down the street vanish as she loses and regains her reflection locked in eternity’s pounding fist.

My mother turns eighty-six today. On cue, the wind blows as if winter has come early, first week of October but there is snow in the suburbs. People shiver and hug themselves at bus stops, the trees muted though not yet bare.

Ko Un writes that in the place where he finds himselfthis world & the Other are drained of difference.And here, where I hold a mug of coffee to fend off the cold, the other world might be what shines through the leaves that have turned yellow on one branch of the maple, or what rises in the steam scented with coffee, or even the wind itself.

In turf-cutter’s pulp I may find my purpose. The rest of the earth moved just as my husband said. Burgeoning and lush. Even the salmon spawned each season. He’d slit their bellies and had me finger the roe. Pray for my long winter seed of a womb. I understood his belief, what bears no fruit is hewn down and cast into pits. I asked him to wait for last harvest. Pleaded it would end without pain. A worthless tomb to become bulb. Time rebirths the body as fire fuel. My second coming, lifted in leathered bruise, as the black maw’s forceps baby.

A Tribute To The Founder

Chris' dream was to feature and support artists all over the world. So in place of donations, please visit the EIL Art Store and shop items by our featured artists. Your support is extremely appreciated.